Kent State: Coming of age 40 years after May 4, 1970 shootings that stunned America

Four decades have slipped by since Neil Young's
"four dead in Ohio
" rang out as a generation's lament on the loss of life and innocence. And some now say a renewed and mature Kent is rising -- even as it finally fully honors its dead and embraces its dreadful place at a deadly point in American history.

Certainly, a stifling shame has long shadowed
Kent State University
-- its particular dishonor earned in 13 cruel and chaotic seconds at 12:24 p.m. on May 4, 1970.

On that day, in that moment, American troops, occupying an American college campus, killed four American students and wounded nine others.

"It's no wonder it seems that this university was just trying to keep its head down for a 40-year period after the shootings," said Kent State President Lester Lefton, who came to the university in 2006.

"But I don't think that's the case anymore. I believe we're a very different and a more successful institution today than we were on May 4, 1970."

"There was always one continuing, difficult conversation that went like this: 'How do we respond to May 4?' " said Michael Schwartz, a former Kent State president during two subsequent May 4 controversies -- the 1977 construction of a gymnasium near the shooting site and the 1980 erection of a memorial.

"This was the case no matter what else was on the table in any context -- no matter what other projects were under way or improvements being made. May 4 was always primary."

The dark anniversary falls in the same year in which Kent State University celebrates its 100th year: It formed as the Kent Normal School (with 144 students) for teachers in 1910.

"Nearly half the life of this institution has now been associated with one, terrible event," said Carol Cartwright, another former Kent president (1991-2006), now president at Bowling Green State University. "That's no small thing -- even in the context of a centennial."

No, but it's not the only thing, Lefton asserts.

"Yes, May 4 was a defining moment -- but it doesn't define us," he said. "And May 4 wasn't about Kent State; it
happened
at Kent State. That's an important distinction."

In recent years, the university appears to be turning toward embracing that distinction.

"We have never had that sense that Kent State has taken ownership for May 4," Krause said. "They may say it's all over and healed, but we still feel like the work, the revealing of truth, is not complete."

Canfora in 2007 unveiled a new digital audio recording of the shootings made by a student in 1970, in which he claimed an order to fire was given. That recording
will finally be professionaly analyzed
using technology never before available.

And Canfora, shot in the wrist that day in 1970 and now head of the non-profit
May 4 Center
, still believes the May 4 Memorial on campus -- built to less than 10 percent of its proposed size -- has never properly honored the dead or wounded.

"The students will agitate again to finish that memorial," he predicted. "The students are not finished with May 4."

It is within that sometimes uneven and uneasy tension regarding May 4 that Kent State's 40-year journey towards wholeness unfolds.

Kent State had culture of openness

Kent State University in May 1970 was a little-known college of 21,000 students nestled in rural Portage County, about 40 miles southeast of Cleveland. Its reputation was mostly that it would take in just about anyone out of any high school.

"It's true: In 1970, this was already an open-access university," Lefton said. "But then, after the shootings, Kent simply became toxic."

Enrollment dropped 13 percent in the four years following the shootings and endowments also dropped off by an unknown measure, officials and historians note.

The campus violence also worsened an already strained college-city relationship.

Kent journalism professor Tim Smith, then a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal -- which won a Pulitzer Prize for
its coverage
of the shootings and its aftermath, said he also saw a frightening reaction among rural Portage County residents.

"I was stopped by farmers with shotguns who wanted to know if I was one of the communists coming into town to stir things up," Smith said.

Schwartz recalled even worse statements from some Kent city residents.

"One of the worst things I've ever heard in all my years was: 'They should have shot more of them,' " Schwartz said. "I never understood how anyone could have thought that about other people's children on a college campus."

Wayne Wilson, a
Kent city
councilman, agreed: "May 4 was just the worst part of a lot of distrust and real divisions here in Kent," he said.

Below: A photographic slide show of events surrounding the May 4, 1970, shootings.

Divisions on its significance

That college-city rift would remain untended for decades while the university sporadically dealt with its own May 4 dichotomy.

"For the first few years, the university was trying to grapple with what went on, and in about year five, they just said, 'Enough. We're not commemorating this anymore,' " said Carole Barbato, a student at Kent in 1979 and
one of the professors
who led the effort to get the May 4 site on the National Register of Historic Places.

"It was really the students, the May 4 Task Force, who pushed it along, during the court hearings that followed the shootings and after."

That -- it was initially the students, and not the institution, who made the effort to remember the dead and injured has long bothered former students and faculty who say Kent State has never taken full responsibility.

"They didn't protect my sister that week," Laurel Krause said. "The university has never owned up to its role in this."

Many faculty, conversely, weren't thrilled with the student organization dredging up May 4, recalled Robert Matson, a former Kent dean now working at the University of Virginia.

"I think for a long time the university -- like me -- wanted to put it behind, to forget about it," Matson said. "The May 4 Task Force wouldn't let that happen. At the time a lot of us didn't like it because it brought up an emotional, hard time.

"But in the end, they were right to do that -- to make sure that people didn't forget too easily."

But forgetting doesn't come easily at Kent
--
especially when the university in 1977 proposed building a new gymnasium annex near where the shootings had occurred.

Protesters occupied a "tent city" on the site for several months. They failed to block construction, but once again Kent State was recognized for May 4 trouble -- not its academics or athletics or anything else.

Schwartz said he now wishes university trustees would have seen the wisdom of not building anything near what was considered sacred ground by many.

"I think they felt that feelings were not running strong anymore -- and they still were," he said. "This isn't something that just goes away."

But it did begin to slowly transform.

Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste came to the 1990 May 4 commemoration and apologized on behalf of state government to the families of the dead and wounded. "Everyone was flabbergasted because that was completely unexpected," Schwartz said.

Then, Cartwright did something in her first year (1991) that none of the previous four presidents had done since 1970 -- she attended the Task Force's candlelight vigil to honor the dead and wounded.

Then, in 1999, the university agreed to place markers in the parking lot near Prentice Hall where students had been shot.

"We finally were able to stop people from standing or parking on the ground where they died, so that was another step in the right direction," said Roseanne "Chic" Canfora, who was on campus in 1970 and is the sister of Alan Canfora. "Little by little, the university itself has begun to come around to recognizing the value of the May 4 victims."

Video:
Two former students in 1970, now Kent State professors, celebrate National Register of Historic Places designation and mourn the past.

Kent State rising

While the May 4 angst ebbed and flowed, still dominating the news out of Kent, the university was quietly building its resume.

"It's almost as if Kent benefited somehow from having to work harder than other colleges about its image because of what happened," Matson said.

Kent State increased academic standards for incoming freshmen in the 1980s and 1990s and emphasized its role as a research college. The latter paid off in 1994 when Kent State made it into a coveted list of research universities kept by the Carnegie Foundation.

Bricks-and-mortar improvements followed with a series of renovations and construction in the late 1990s.

Old dorms were demolished, new ones were built. The university renovated its historic original campus and built a new student recreation center and academic buildings like a $20 million communications and journalism building.

By the 30th anniversary of the Kent State shootings in 2000, the groundwork was in place for the university to come more into the open, daring to portray itself as something other than "the place where kids were shot on campus," Lefton said.

And finally, during Cartwright's tenure, the university turned a corner in its approach to May 4. A survey of city residents said they wanted the university to get off the fence and either bury May 4 or own it. The university's own studies and an alumni group report also said it was time.

"We began to see that we should deal with May 4 in the right way -- in a context of making it a learning moment," Cartwright said.

Kent in the future

Kent is already looking ahead.

Following 2008, in which the university spent $38 million in new construction, Kent State is pursuing three new projects -- one distinctly May 4-related and the other two indicative of how the university aims to build on strengths, while reconciling its one lingering division by reconnecting the two Kents:

The university has hired a Washington, D.C., museum designer,
Gallagher & Associates
(Woodstock Museum in New York, Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beachwood) and is trying to raise money to build a May 4 Visitors' Center in Taylor Hall, atop the hill that was central in the shootings.

Kent's new College of Public Health
started accepting students this school year and has 146 students and 15 faculty members. It becomes only the second in Ohio after Ohio State University and one of 33 nationwide.

"This is big," said Lefton, noting that studies show that Ohio will need some 10,000 public-health workers -- from epidemiology to health services administration -- over the next decade or so. "This is the new future in education at Kent State -- it's a big investment for us with the payoff to come many years from now."

Also, the university and city are working together to physically link the university and downtown. They'll do it by extending into downtown Kent something called the University Esplanade, a 30-foot-wide, one-mile long walkway that now meanders across campus.

The extension, expected to be completed in time for the opening of a new hotel and conference center in downtown Kent (paid for in part by a $20 million federal stimulus grant), is not only physical but "intellectual, emotional -- and it's financial," Lefton said.

City Manager David Ruller agreed: "This is hardly purely philanthropic," he said. "The university makes up 40 percent of our tax base. Every city knows to take care of its biggest employer, so this is an orchestrated effort, not just chance."

But it gives Kent State University and the city of Kent a chance to find a unity that many say the two have never had since May 4, 1970.

"University cities can be unique places and they are one of the few developing hot spots across the country," Ruller said. "Now that we're working together, we can be a part of that."

Ruller's involvement and the new Kent ideal also might give Matson the notion that it might be time to come back to the Kent he fled in the 1970s.

"Even though I've not been back and I've been watching only from afar, I admire what they've done there," said Matson, who found out about Kent's changes after mentoring Ruller in a program at Virginia.

"There's nothing I could hope for or pray for than this -- to see Kent, and me, coming around to closure, to finally deal with this and to recover from it."

Kent today

When Kent State leaders are asked what aspects of the university set it apart today, they often cite four areas:

The Liquid Crystal Institute. Research into the properties of liquid crystals pre-dates May 4, 1970 -- but is ironically connected to the demonstrations of that era.

The group Students for a Democratic Society reportedly decried the groundbreaking research being conducted at Kent State because it was funded in part by the Defense Department, a federal report said.

No one is protesting against LCI now.

The institute recently netted $15 million in outside grants to Kent "to attract the best minds in the world to do their research here," said Oleg Lavrentovich, a native of Kiev, Russia, who came to the LCI in 1992. "The idea is that what happens here leads to economic growth throughout Ohio someday."

New fashion school director J.R. Campbell gushes that the school, started in the decade following the shootings, is now world-class.

"I've been to maybe 25 different institutions with a fashion program -- in Europe, the U.K. especially, in New Zealand and here in the States, and this facility is right up there with the best of them," said Campbell, who came to Kent in 2009.

Kent now has small campuses for fashion students in New York City's fashion district (50 students); Florence, Italy (200); Geneva, Switzerland (50); and Beijing (10) and is exploring opportunities in Turkey and several African countries.

Kent also has the only
simulated Air Traffic Control Center
among Ohio colleges, and its Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative program is the only one in the state accredited by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The $2 million simulated control tower allows student controllers to mimic an entire flight from takeoff to landing. The school will graduate its first class next year.

"The FAA predicts there will be a need for more than 14,000 air traffic controllers by 2018," said Maj. Maureen MacFarland, academic program director of aeronautics. "Kent is going to be one of the schools that's getting them ready."

NCCA athletics. Retiring Athletic Director Laing Kennedy said people all over the country know Kent State for something entirely different from the May 4 shootings.

The Golden Flashes became a March Madness darling in the 2002 NCAA basketball tournament, falling one game short of a Final Four appearance and securing the school's place among the most competitive "midmajor" universities in the country.

And then there's football -- although Kent has seen players like Antonio Gates,
the Browns' Josh Cribbs
and others make it to the NFL, the team is rarely competitive.

"But we're going to have a winning football team," KSU President Lester Lefton insisted last month (on the day he hired a new athletic director). "That's next."